Kedron Rhodes

This is a shorter edition this week as we’re taking a couple of days to head to the U.P. (upper peninsula of Michigan) for family vacation. But sometimes the best insights come when you step back and focus on what really matters. This week’s articles center on leadership and culture—and if you’re going to focus on anything as a strategic leader, you can’t go wrong with those fundamentals.

I’ve been thinking lately about how much of our leadership discourse gets caught up in frameworks, methodologies, and systems thinking (guilty as charged). All of that matters, but what strikes me about the most effective leaders I’ve worked with is how they master the human elements first. They know their people deeply. They’re willing to be vulnerable with their ideas. They build character through adversity rather than trying to avoid it altogether.

The three pieces this week hit on exactly these themes—from the tactical art of really knowing your team, to the counterintuitive courage required to share your best ideas, to the long-term work of building organizational character that can weather any storm. These aren’t just nice-to-have leadership qualities. In an era where competitive advantage increasingly comes from speed, adaptation, and innovation, these human elements become the strategic differentiators.

We’re living through times that demand both strategic thinking and deep humanity from our leaders. The companies and teams that master both will be the ones still standing when the dust settles.

The Leadership Power of Knowing Your Team 🚀

Skip Prichard opens with a story that stops you in your tracks: Apollo 13’s Gene Kranz facing a life-or-death crisis with his team at Mission Control. When catastrophe struck, Kranz didn’t assign tasks based on seniority or hierarchy. He relied on his deep understanding of each team member—who thrived under pressure, who could troubleshoot with precision, who could collaborate without ego. That intimate knowledge, built over years of listening and observing, became the difference between disaster and one of history’s greatest rescues. Understanding doesn’t stop at knowing someone’s role or strengths. It’s about knowing how they think, what motivates them, and even what holds them back. Prichard provides a practical roadmap for building this depth of understanding through deliberate actions: asking open-ended questions, observing reactions in various situations, and making time for genuine personal connections. The strategic implication? In our increasingly complex business environment, the leaders who can quickly mobilize their teams’ unique strengths will consistently outmaneuver those who treat people as interchangeable resources. (Dive Into the Details →)

🪏 Take it a bit deeper with these…

💡 Strategic Leadership Insights

• Sam Altman: “No matter how great your idea is, no one cares.” — OpenAI’s CEO delivers a counterintuitive truth about secrecy and competition. Extreme secrecy among founders is a bad sign. You want to keep some things secret for sure, but you should be willing to talk about the broad sketches of what you’re doing because you need that to recruit people, to get investors, to get customers. Altman’s insight challenges the conventional wisdom about protecting ideas, arguing that the fear of sharing often does more damage than actual competition.

• Jensen Huang: “The character of a company is the most important thing” — NVIDIA’s CEO explains how organizational resilience gets built through adversity, not despite it. A company is made of people. It’s not made of the document that describes the culture. It’s not the inscription of the core values on the building. That’s not what makes the company’s culture. Huang’s perspective on suffering through “5-7 existential crises” in NVIDIA’s first 15 years reveals how character gets forged in the crucible of real challenges, creating competitive advantages that can’t be copied.

👋 Sign-Off

Next week we’re headed to the Global Leadership Summit in Chicago. If you’re going, let me know and we can connect. If you’re not going, I highly recommend it—it’s a remarkable event with some of the world’s most thoughtful leadership voices.

Whether you’re heading into vacation mode or diving deeper into summer projects, remember that your competitive advantage as a leader isn’t just in your strategic frameworks—it’s in how deeply you know your people, how courageously you share your vision, and how consistently you build character through the inevitable challenges ahead.

Catch you soon from the shores of Lake Superior!

⁓ Kedron

P.S. There’s something about getting away from the usual rhythms that helps clarify what really matters. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by the tactical demands of leadership, sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is step back and reconnect with the humans you’re leading. The frameworks will still be there when you get back—but the relationships require your presence.